Since my new son had started sleeping in a different room in his crib a few weeks ago, Babyphone has been an indispensible tool to keep an ear on the baby during the night when he wakes up.

After tweaking the Babyphone settings to the desired sensitivity the first time, putting the N900 next to the crib has become routine. I just make sure the battery is at least 60% and launch the app. When my son wakes up, Babyphone faithfully calls my other phone sitting right next to my bed.

Big thanks to the dev and the collective maemo.org community for this free and awesome app.

Been away from the testing scene lately because I have been carrying my new Blackberry from work instead of the N900. I tried carrying both together for a while but it turned out to be too inconvenient.

Anyway, the testing queue is growing ever longer. Its good in a way to see apps actively being developed on Maemo but its also unfortunate to see many of them not getting voted for. It would be great see the testing queue get cleared so that new apps or newer versions become available in the stable Extras quickly.

Here are some apps I tested lately that need some votes. If you have some time to spare, give them a try and vote if you think they meet the criteria.

Its a nice Live-Wallpaper-like application developed by Nokia. The gas balls bounce around on the desktop, respond to tilt, and explode in vibrant colors when touched.

It comes in 3 modes:

1) Fullscreen

2) Background

This mode will turn the app into a Live-Wallpaper but still respond to tilt and touch.

3) Transparent

This mode will run as a transparent layer on top of the current background.

The app is resource intensive but nice to play around with. The physics behind it are impresssive as the balls bounce on the widgets and the flames wrap around desktop widgets. Its also good to see Nokia still coming up with apps for Maemo.

Now the downside. It doesn’t play well with Live-Wallpaper. Sherman-Aquarium disappeared but continued to take system-resources. Had to restart it from the Settings.

After buying an iPhone 3gS today, I took my 6 year old to Chuck-E-Cheese’s as I had promised last week; even though I find its ambience utterly unbearable.

In order to use the 3gS on T-Mobile, I had planned to jailbreak it after getting home. But while hanging out at ChuckE, in the midst of the yelling, crying and laughing kids, it occurred to me that a jailbreak using a hotspot tether over 3G is entirely possible!

So I whipped out the N900, fired up MobileHotspot, and laid it on the table away from the pizza and soda stains while my son was busy dropping tokens in mindless games. After its usual set of annoyances, the Hotspot started; and the iPhone duly picked it up. It was then simply a matter of going to jailbreakme.com and sliding to begin 🙂

T-Mobile’s connection, thankfully, remained solid during the download and the process completed painlessly.

T-Mobile USA is currently inviting its subscribers to test their IPv6 beta service if they have an IPv6 enabled device. The N900 does not support IPv6 out-of-the-box but the Maemo platform is easily capable of enabling IPv6 via a custom kernel. So, if you are feeling adventurous with the N900 and want to help the best carrier in the US, sign-up for the beta!

To test the beta-service, you need to:

1. be on T-Mobile’s unlimited data-plan. This also includes those who managed to get the $10 unlimited plan.

2. register on their website by filling out a form and wait for the confirmation. The response time in my case was a couple of hours.

The setup for the N900 is quite straightforward. In general the following will setup a dual-stack (IPv6/IPv4), details on this post; and a lot more here. If you would like IPv6 only instead, look here

1. Install Power kernel.

2. Download the 2 enable and disable scripts,place them in the /etc/network/if-up.d/ and /etc/network/if-down.d/ folders respectively, and make them executable.

Got acquainted with Raemote today. A desktop widget that allows remote control of FrontRow. Its works great on my MacBook Pro! but I noticed that the application doesn’t optimize its use of lircd. This hits the battery hard. I let the developer know at t.m.o. Hopefully, a solution will come around soon. Until then I will be restarting lircd via scripts.

BTW, FrontRow rocks! Haven’t seen anything like that on Windows/Ubuntu.

If you have been following this blog, you already know that the N900 is remarkable in its ability to adapt itself in various environments. This post will describe the steps needed in situations where you would like to connect to the internet using the N900’s wifi connection via USB from a desktop (or less likely, a laptop) that does not have a wifi-adapter.

There might be other ways, but this post will explain the setup using SSH tunneling. The only drawback of this approach is that t

6. Modify the system proxy settings (System->Network Proxy) to use SOCKS proxy on localhost port 9999. Apply System-Wide to have all internet applications use it.

7. You are now online!

Windows 7/XP

1. Connect the N900 to the wifi access-point.

2. Connect the USB cable and select PC Suite Mode.

3. On the N900, execute as root:
ifup usb0
route del default usb0

4. Make sure you can ping the N900 (192.168.2.15)

5. Create a SSH tunnel on localhost port 9999 using PuTTY. The tunneling option is under SSH->Tunnels. Enter 9999 as port, select ‘Dynamic’ and click Add. Open the connection to the N900 (192.168.2.15)